Feng Liu Chicago | Feng Liu Street Photography

Chicago: Waiting for the Dream

When I think back to the years I spent photographing Chicago Cubs fans, I sometimes cannot believe how much time has passed.

For four seasons, I attended more than 300 Cubs games. But my project did not begin or end at the gates of Wrigley Field. Before the games, after the games, and in the hours between them, I walked through the surrounding neighborhoods with my camera. I watched the streets fill with people. I watched strangers become friends. I watched families pass traditions from one generation to the next.

I was photographing baseball, but I was really photographing something much larger.

I was photographing Chicago.

I arrived in Chicago from Shanghai in 1999. At first, the city was overwhelming. Everything was unfamiliar—the streets, the architecture, the people, the sounds, the pace of life. I did not know how to belong to this place.

So I walked. And I photographed.

Photography became my way of slowing down and paying attention. Through my camera, I began to understand that a city is not simply its skyline or its famous buildings. A city is its people. It is found in the way they gather, celebrate, work, struggle, remember, and hope.

The Cubs brought me into one of those worlds.

I photographed fans on the streets and in the stands, on their way to the ballpark and on their way home. I photographed excitement and disappointment, celebration and silence. I photographed fathers with their children, lifelong friends, couples, strangers, neighborhood characters, and people who had followed the team for as long as they could remember.

I photographed more than 40,000 frames of black-and-white film.

Black and white felt right for this project. Without color, I could concentrate on faces, gestures, light, shadows, expressions, and the relationships between people. The photographs became less about baseball and more about the human experience surrounding it.

And there was something extraordinary about Cubs fans.

They believed.

Year after year, they returned with the same hope, even when history gave them very little reason to expect a different ending. Their loyalty was not based simply on winning. It was something deeper—a connection to family, neighborhood, memory, and identity.

For many fans, being a Cubs fan was not a choice. It was part of who they were.

For me, that devotion was both fascinating and deeply moving.

At the time, I decided not to exhibit the photographs publicly. I wanted to wait.

I wanted to wait until the Cubs won the World Series.

It was a strange decision. I had no idea when that day would come. It might have been a few years. It might have been another generation. But I wanted these photographs to remain together until the story had reached its ending.

Then, in 2016, the impossible happened.

The Cubs won the World Series.

And suddenly, the photographs I had made years earlier felt different.

I realized that I had not been documenting a championship.

I had been documenting the years before the championship—the waiting, the believing, the uncertainty, the extraordinary ability of people to hold on to hope.

The photographs became a record of a city waiting for something it desperately wanted but could not control.

When the Cubs finally won, Chicago celebrated in a way that seemed to erase the boundaries between generations, neighborhoods, and strangers. For a moment, the entire city seemed to share one memory.

I had often imagined what that day would look like.

I could not have imagined it.

Looking back, I understand that the real subject of this body of work was never baseball. It was belonging.

When I first arrived from Shanghai, I was looking at Chicago from the outside. I carried a camera because I wanted to understand this new city. Slowly, through thousands of encounters, I became a witness to its life.

The Cubs project was one of those encounters.

I entered as a photographer. I stayed because of the people.

More than 40,000 black-and-white negatives remain from those four seasons. They contain not only faces and moments, but a particular Chicago—a Chicago that waited, believed, suffered, laughed, and finally celebrated.

These photographs remind me that sometimes history is not found in the moment when something happens.

Sometimes history is found in the years of waiting before it happens.

And sometimes a camera allows us to see what we did not yet know we were witnessing.

I was photographing the people who believed in the dream before the dream came true.

That may be the most Chicago story of all.